About
Urmitapa Dutta is an associate professor in psychology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a 2019-2020 NCID scholar-in-residence. At UMass Lowell, she is also involved with several interdisciplinary programs: Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Global Studies.During her time at the University of Michigan, Dr. Dutta is interested in collaborating around the following areas: building communities of resistance (in academia and beyond); women's everyday activism; and decolonizing research and practice in the areas of violence and violence prevention, citizenship and community-based research and action.A feminist activist scholar with an interdisciplinary training, her research program has a two-fold aim: to interrogate everyday violence, i.e., forms of direct, structural, and symbolic violence that become endemic to society and are no longer questioned; and, to develop community-engaged interventions that address everyday violence.Working alongside communities in India and in the US, Dr. Dutta uses critical qualitative methodologies to elucidate and intervene in the linkages between everyday social suffering and oppressive structures by centering voices/experiences that are silenced by officially sanctioned narratives. The commitment to understanding and alleviating varied forms of oppression and exclusions inform her research, teaching, and service. Dr. Dutta has a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Current Work
Dr. Dutta’s current work explores the phenomena of everyday violence through two interconnected lines of inquiry:I. Gendered Violence in Northeast India: Centering Women’s Analysis: This project investigates gendered patterns of violence in the Northeastern borderlands of India, where Dr. Dutta was born and raised. Foregrounding Garo tribal women’s analysis, her critical ethnographic research investigates the spectrum of violence—domestic violence, sex trafficking, sexual abuse, direct violence, and economic exploitation—that shape Garo women’s daily lives. Highlighting how patriarchal power is produced and maintained at the intersections of coloniality, militarism, and matrilineal social systems, this work also explores how women engage in everyday resistance and activism. II. Disrupting Everyday Violence Through Action Research: Dr. Dutta uses participatory and action research methodologies to understand, document, and address everyday violence experienced by youth in Lowell, MA. This work is carried out in collaboration with youth-based organizations and is explicitly focused on creating opportunities for critical youth assertion and youth resistance. Examples of (youth-driven) issues taken up in this work include transforming damage-centered of narratives of Lowell and advocating for change of dress-code policies that reproduce gendered inequalities. In addition to these projects, Dr. Dutta is also committed to the promotion of epistemic justice, i.e., development of conceptual frameworks and pedagogical approaches that disrupt the violence inherent in intellectual colonization. Current projects in this area include: decolonizing the construct of “community” in community-based research and practice; rethinking citizenship, migration, and belonging by centering Southern contexts and feminist theory.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Activist scholarship; decoloniality; feminism; inclusive citizenship; qualitative research; structural violence
